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Re: [Help-smalltalk] Re: Starting with smalltalk


From: Mike Anderson
Subject: Re: [Help-smalltalk] Re: Starting with smalltalk
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:46:14 +0000
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.5 (X11/20050711)

Sorry to be weighing in so late on this one. My brain works slowly in
the summer heat...

Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> I've been reading the GNU smalltalk manual, but the following I havn't
>> been able to find on the web yet:
>> - A GNU smalltalk compatible, functional program
> 
> You mean a program written with gst?  Unfortunately I don't know of any
> :-(  Mike Anderson has some on his blog, but they're small.

What you will find is that one of the major problems Smalltalk has as a
language is that the dialects are sufficiently dissimilar that programs
are not very portable, so the only programs you will find for GSt are
those that were written for GSt. There are projects that aim to remedy
this, eg. Sport. Porting Sport to gst would be a very useful project.

The other main problem, related to the above, is that the Smalltalk Way
is image-based development, which unfortunately means that the easiest
way to distribute programs is as images, not code.

At a personal level, the main problem I have is that the packaging
system is a bit inflexible, so splitting out a package is hard work.

>> - A way of editing smalltalk files without the use of a commercial IDE

This sounds as if you're thinking about commercial Smalltalks, like
Visual Works. Actually, most other Smalltalks don't use files - you
develop within the IDE, and code at the method level. Where the source
code is outside of the image, it is found in a repository like Envy or
Store, ie. a database.

> GNU Smalltalk has an Emacs mode.

SciTE also has syntax-highlighting, if, like me, you never really got to
grips with Emacs (if you're using Emacs, surely you must prefer Lisp
over Smalltalk?).

Mike




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